Identity in hip-hop

My posts for the next few days will be dispatches from Washington, DC, where I am attending a strong, well-organized and interesting "teach-in" organized by the non-profit group Words Beats and Life.

I arrived in the Washington DC area last night, and today was at the DC Architectural Building at 9:15 a.m. for day one of a hip-hop teach-in called "Remixing the Art of Social Change," sponsored by the DC hip-hop community organization Words, Beats & Life.
The teach-in runs three days, and is divided into three themes: identity, capacity, and legacy, with a day devoted to each one of these themes. Today the theme was identity, and as the day unfolded, it became clear that within hip-hop, identity has a multi-layered and complex meaning.
Emery Petchauer, a professor at Oakland University north of Detroit, delivered a morning keynote. It featured prominently examples of graffiti and graffiti inspired art, in which identity of self, community, culture, politics, and history could be read into each piece. Petchauer showed a tag from Philadelphia and described how the shape of the letters and style of the tag made it unmistakably Philly to those who knew the coding. He then showed a couple of examples of hip-hop jackets and t-shirts that artists and students of his had designed, and walked us through an intricate decoding.
I love this idea of graffiti as a code. It is illegal, and the term itself is associated with vandalism, as the afternoon keynote speaker Maxx Moses explained. He noted that "we never referred to it as graffiti. We called it writing."
Writing is a kinesthetic practice that allows an artist to work an idea out, struggle with finding herself, and engage in self-expression. Through writing, one might always see themselves as coming back to what Maxx Moses called the essential questions: a) Who am I? b) Why am I here? and c) What is my purpose?
It seems that hip-hop offers both youth and adults a dynamic, creative, and rather risky vehicle for exploring those essential questions. My use of the term "risky" is not mis-placed because risk is what drives one to reach for stronger, loftier, and higher aims. Risk reminded me of the b-girls in Seattle whom I hope to connect with in a couple of weeks, and how they describe their participation in break-dancing particularly and in hip-hop more generally as a quest for knowing themselves by always striving to get better at their art. Their risk-taking involved walking a non-conventional path, sacrificing a more financially secure career path, disappointing perhaps their parents and other family members, and being different from the average American woman. The term risk also resonated when a young African American woman asked Maxx Moses what it was about the 1970s that allowed hip-hop to flourish, that gave black people a coming together in the discovery of "soul" and made them feel for the first time in a long history of slavery and racial and economic oppression as if they could "Say it out loud: I'm black and I'm proud."
Moses' response was "having absolutely nothing." There was poverty, there was crisis.
Today, he noted, there is no crisis. Black people have got food, homes, careers, access to the wealth of society.
Or at least some think they do, the young woman noted.
Some think they do, Moses replied, repeating the young woman's words.
Moses then made what seemed like simultaneously a radical and completely sensible point. If you think you've got it all and you're bored, try doing with less. Get rid of what you don't need. Don't eat so much. Put yourself back into a mode of crisis.
Petchauer made the important point that hip-hop is inherently a localized practice. He said, "Hip-hop is a real-time event, happening in specific places with specific people at a particular time." As a result, everyone's understanding of their hip-hop is going to be different, based on what their own identity within the place and the people they're around at a particular moment. I felt that that offered a fairly cogent discussion of how one might see the self-place relationship within hip-hop.
There was much more to day one. I'll do my best to catch up with more review and reflection. For now, I've hit my 750 words and my eyelids are closing. I'm drifting off to sleep.